A Journey Benefiting an Entire Kingdom

GOSI Accelerates Digital Transformation Through Microservices and API Management

We partnered with the General Organization for Social Insurance (GOSI) – previously Public Pension Authority (PPA) – to help them achieve their goals and milestones towards digital transformation. We met with Tariq Alburaykan, the Integration Services Unit Manager at GOSI, to gain a more in-depth view from his perspective into the project, GOSI’s journey, and its outcomes.

Alburaykan began by giving a brief history regarding GOSI’s Digital Transformation Initiative. GOSI had a vision for an aggressive and innovative digital transformation strategy which was not possible to implement with their existing legacy system. GOSI’s middleware and API platform at the time were too complex to maintain, had performance and stability issues, and could not cater for GOSI’s current and future APIs and integration requirements.

As such, GOSI’s aggressive digital transformation roadmap was blocked due to the legacy system currently in place from which arose the need to modernize.

It was through an assessment of the situation and a deep understanding of GOSI’s innovative digital strategy that it became clear to Sumerge that GOSI was looking for a solution unlike any other available on the market.

This is when Sumerge proposed a modern platform based on an API-first strategy, running containers based on microservices architecture using the IBM Cloud Pak for Integration and relying on DevOps practices.

“Our team, coupled up with our strategic partner, Sumerge, managed to work as a single harmonious team to seamlessly achieve GOSI’s business needs,” said Alburaykan.

The result was a complete success where GOSI was able to provide pensioners with top-notch services while having almost no downtime.

10X Increase in transactions per second
192M Transactions per month

Alburaykan further stated that the challenge had been doubled due to parallel running initiatives related to core pension migration, multiplying pensioner digital services and G2G/G2B services.

The Engines Behind the Roar

Our approach to this project was direct and impactful. We decided to migrate the system to a Microservices Architecture running on containers using IBM Cloud Pak for Integration on Red Hat OpenShift.

The microservices architecture enabled us to break down the large legacy system into smaller domain-based microservices running on separate containers, which sped up the implementation of new features and deployments to production by five times, resulting in a much faster time to market.

All the new components had automated DevOps pipelines ensuring both quality and speed. We exposed the separate containers as REST APIs to run on Red Hat OpenShift.

This was a low-risk, agile, phased approach where the two systems coexisted during migration, moving components in sprints every two weeks. We prioritized migrating components that had scalability issues and caused performance bottlenecks, offloading the legacy system to a modern, scalable platform. Each microservice can now scale independently based on its load at runtime, eliminating the need to scale the entire system for a performance boost.

Our API-first strategy exposed all the pension services as APIs that could be consumed by digital channels and external organizations. This approach fostered innovation in digital channels, allowed for rapid service development, and enabled data exchange with external organizations. It also supported the implementation of API management strategy and technologies, enabling API lifecycle management, security, discovery, and monitoring.

We implemented G2G integration services with more than 60 external entities in a short period, achieving the highest rank of G2G maturity in the Saudi Government’s ranking.

Through Event Driven Architecture, we set up the foundation for data and events streaming in GOSI to enable data-driven services and near real-time actions, improving customer experience and automating business processes.

“It was through a lot of hard work, dedication and technical innovation that we were able to launch more than 160 services to our pensioners, manage the core pension migration, and launch tens of G2G/G2B services,” said Alburaykan.

Achievements Unlocked!

Many achievements were accomplished through the hard work and dedication of Sumerge and GOSI. We significantly increased the capacity and speed of building and deploying services, which boosted time to market while improving stability and scalability. The system can now handle 500 transactions per second, up from just 50.

With the Microservices Architecture adoption and IBM Cloud Pak for Integration running on Red Hat OpenShift, we introduced an event-based data pipeline platform implementing near real-time data pipelines on Apache Kafka for the Customer 360 Master Data Management (MDM). We also built more than 265 integration services running on the new platform, processing over 192 million transactions monthly.

Proactive monitoring and tracking across the whole platform included an event-based monitoring solution, ensuring smooth, robust integrated services for more than 60 external entities.

Furthermore, we built and trained independent teams within GOSI to work on the same framework, ensuring a successful hybrid-teams model and giving GOSI the flexibility to move forward with its own in-house development capabilities.

60+ External entities integrated
265 Integration services

About the General Organization for Social Insurance

GOSI is a governmental entity that is financially and administratively independent, providing social protection and insurance coverage in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. It covers Saudi civil and military employees, private sector workers, and workers employed on item-of-wages contracts in the public sector. It also implements the social insurance law, its branches, its executive regulations, and the civil and military pension laws in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

“Our team, coupled up with our strategic partner, Sumerge, managed to work as a single harmonious team to seamlessly achieve GOSI’s business needs,” said Tarek Alburaykan, Integration Services Unit Manager at GOSI.